5 companies to test mobile coupons at grocery chain

Five companies are teaming up with grocery retailer The Kroger Co. to revive coupon redemption by rolling out mobile coupons. The Procter & Gamble Co., The Clorox Co., Del Monte Corp., Kimberly-Clark Corp. and General Mills Inc. will begin a four-month test sometime this spring to determine how consumers will react to using wireless coupons.

Users will download a mobile-marketing application from San Jose-based Cellfire Inc. to their cell phones, enabling coupons from the companies to be stored directly on their wireless devices.

The companies want to reach consumers in the 25-year-old-to-34-year-old age range, because this group includes young families who might need baby supplies, home-cleaning and household products, but who also don't use traditional paper coupons.

"The key objective for this test is to find out who are the people who actually would use a mobile for [these types of] transactions," said Tai Doong, director of digital marketing at Del Monte Foods. Doong declined to discuss how much the program would cost Del Monte.

While in a Kroger store, shoppers can use their phones as virtual shopping lists. If a shopper finds a coupon he wants to use, he selects it from his cell phone and the discount information is sent to Kroger's computer system, which identifies the shopper by his loyalty-card number. The discount is then applied when the shopper presents the loyalty card at checkout. Once the coupon is used or expires, it is automatically deleted from the consumer's phone and savings card to prevent overredemption, Cellfire said.

"Mobile/paperless is a winning combination," said Roger Entner, senior vice president of the communications sector at New York-based IAG Research. "You have quite a dedicated group of people who love to get coupons and a bargain, and this makes it pretty straight forward for people to get their coupons."

How Windows XP contributes to global warming

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that no more than 10% of all PCs in use by organizations have power management enabled, and as a result are wasting large amounts of electricity and contributing to greenhouse gases. One major culprit may be Windows XP.

Unlike the Vista operating system, Windows XP does not give system administrators the ability to natively manage power settings on PCs over a network. That may be hindering adoption of the power management functions available in the operating system.

But XP isn't going away anytime soon, and EPA believes that PC power management is an obvious way to save power. It has gone as far as develop a source tool, EZ GPO (Group Policy Objects), and has made it freely available for download. This tool gives system administrators the ability to control power management over the network. It's not needed for Vista, which has these management controls included.

The EPA estimates that a typical 1,000-PC environment can save $40,000 annually by activating power management, which would reduce power use by 400,000 kWh -- enough electricity to light 220 homes annually. From a greenhouse gas perspective, it reduces gas emissions by 300 tons, or the annual emissions of 50 cars.

Laptops linked to detect earthquakes

Many laptops have an accelerometer, a sensor that detects motion and free fall, and that can be used to detect the intensity of earthquakes when a laptop shakes, said Cochran, a seismologist and assistant professor at the department of earth sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Cochran, along with other scientists, is working on the Quake-Catcher Network (QCN), a project that harnesses seismic data from sensors on Internet-connected laptops in different locations to help capture earthquakes. When the laptop isn't being used, special software on laptops collects sensor data, which along with the laptop's location, is sent over the Internet to an earthquake data repository where the data is analyzed.

Amassing sensor data from thousands of Internet-connected laptops could determine an earthquake's intensity and its exact location, which could be helpful for first responders in relief efforts, Cochran said. It could also help examine quake trends over time at different locations.

The goal is to create a dense seismic network for scientific study and to measure how shaking gets concentrated, Cochran said. The data will also be a resource for first responders to identify the exact location of an earthquake for rapid relief. Currently the network has 300 people signed up, but Cochran hopes to sign up more participants in different locations.